Counter-Cultural Pause + Overnight Oats
Pausing in the country we serve in means taking a nap after a big lunch, or at least lying down to rest. The two-to-three-hour lunch break recognized by many businesses and schools leaves ample time for a midday rest. There is a yearly rest during the Lunar New Year when nearly all businesses are closed […]
Sabbath Week
Does your heart need space to slow down, rest, and process? Enter Sabbath. In her book Rhythms of Renewal, Rebekah Lyons said, “Taking a rest isn’t a sign of weakness. Yet our culture whispers the opposite: if we try harder, work smarter, make the right career moves . . . we just might live a life […]
Practicing for Eternity
Working in a university ministry means that when people are joining the staff team, they are usually newly graduated students who have come through the ministry themselves. These new interns bring energy, passion, enthusiasm, and fresh perspectives and insights. They don’t bring a lot of life experience or practical wisdom. Once they get onto the […]
Why is Resting So Much Work?
Anne Lamott said, “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” It’s true. So why does keeping a Sabbath rhythm often feel so hard? Rest shouldn’t be work, right? Yet I often struggle to rest. My heart longs for it. There are days I wake up and my […]
This Month’s Theme: Pause
Psalm 46:10 (NIV) He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” Sabbath is the gift of space God has given us to pause and breathe. Our bodies find rest and our souls do too. Pausing doesn’t just happen naturally […]
God In the Pause
When we pause, we have opportunity to reflect. We get some distance from daily life as we know it, and with it some perspective. COVID provided a pause to our daily lives. Even though we continued with language, albeit less hours than normal, most everything else paused: church activities, school runs, playdates, coffee dates. That […]
Learning to Land
From the balcony window I can look out over the city and see the airport, usually marked by the coming and going of planes, in the distance. Often, I have stood and watched, bare toes on cold tiles, tea steaming in my hands, and watched as a plane makes a slow, wide circle, once, twice, […]
10 Questions to Ask During the Pandemic Pause
“Time is flying by. And time is standing still,” a friend observed to me the other day, trying to sum up how life has felt during the coronavirus pandemic. I think she captured exactly how the past few months have felt. Somehow it’s already August even though it feels like we never quite made it […]
This Week’s Theme: Pause
You know that moment when the video you’ve been streaming stops to buffer? You can’t control when that little circle will stop spinning, when your movie or show will resume. You just have to wait. Whether you live in the land of fast internet or not, we all know what it is like to be […]